When outsourcing your call centre needs to a third party, it is important that they understand your business. They will be directly representing your business when they interact with customers. This makes it very important that they understand a couple of things. I will go over these below:
- Customer loyalty is directly affected by call centre interaction
- Your choice in call centre impacts your business’s image
BRAND REPRESENTATION
Creating a brand is a timely, expensive, and tedious process. Large organization spend millions annually to market, maintain, and endear their brands to customers. Although, intangible a company’s brand is one of its most valuable assets. One specialist defines brand as, “the sum of all feelings, thoughts and recognitions – positive and negative – that people in the target audience have about a company, a product or service .” Much of the effort and resources spent to properly brand a product or service can go to waste if the customer’s last experience with a business is negative. Call centres either are strengthening aids to customer loyalty or catalysts of customer defection.
One specialist defines brand as, “the sum of all feelings, thoughts and recognitions – positive and negative – that people in the target audience have about a company, a product or service.”
Using offshore call centres can increase chances for international competition.
CULTURAL GAFFES
Business culture is quite unique. In parts of the country a quick-witted, straight to business demeanor is required. In other regions a relaxed engaging interaction works best. Yet, everyone expects kindness, patience, and clarity of language. Cultural mistakes in kindness and language result in severe customer dissatisfaction. A study by ClaesFornell International (CFI) reflects that customers that have negative experiences with call centres share those events publicly 30% more often than customers that have positive ones. Consequently, businesses that have negative call centre interactions will ultimately need to spend more to fix the public’s perception about their service. Foreign or offshore call centres are known to have great difficulties in understanding American culture and language. Although many offshore call centres may know English, their level of expertise is often not high enough to decipher regional jargon and colloquialisms. Often this results in cultural gaffes that cause customers to view a business in a negative light.
When weighing the potential loss of business versus the tiny amount of savings afforded by offshore call centres, many U.K. businesses have selected onshore call centres who can identify with the customers they serve.